Works
Dowson is best remembered for some vivid phrases, such as "days of wine and roses" from his poem "Vitae Summa Brevis" (1896), which appears in the stanza:
- They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
- Out of a misty dream
- Our path emerges for a while, then closes
- Within a dream.
and "gone with the wind", from Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae, the third stanza of which reads:
- I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
- Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
- Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
- But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
- Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
- I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
This poem was first published in The Second Book of the Rhymer's Club in 1894 and was noticed by Richard le Gallienne in his Wanderings in Bookland column in The Idler, volume 9, p. 889.
The last line of this stanza, which is the last line of all four stanzas of the poem, was the inspiration for the song title "Always True to You in My Fashion" from Kiss Me, Kate by Cole Porter.
Margaret Mitchell, touched by the "far away, faintly sad sound I wanted" of the third stanza's first line, chose that line as the title of her only novel: Gone with the Wind.
Dowson also provides the earliest use of the word soccer in written language according to the Oxford English Dictionary (although he spells it socca, presumably because it did not yet have a standard written form).
His prose works include the short stories collected as Dilemmas (1895), and the two novels A Comedy of Masks and Adrian Rome (each co-written with Arthur Moore). Some of his short prose was first published in the journal The Yellow Book.
Read more about this topic: Ernest Dowson
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Are you there, Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron, in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent, are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)